Hello WordPress.com

This is the third reincarnation of this website.  It’s amazing how time flies by.

V1

Built early 2007 on websitebaker, I self hosted this on various available university computers. At the time I was working as a Linux sysadmin and going to school. I liked websitebaker because of how simple it was to customize and figure out how it worked.  Here is a post on the theme.

V2

Built in mid 2009 when I was leaving the university to go work for IOActive in Seattle, I needed a new place for hosting which I had been getting for free. I went with site5 largely because it was cheap (around $5/month), and it had ssh access so I could migrate fairly easily (e.g. leaving all files in the same structure). I also migrated from websitebaker to wordpress, which is a huge improvement in my opinion. With the wife’s help, I wrote the Ryu theme as a modification of the existing theme.

V3

I don’t get a lot of traffic, but when I do get bursts then site5 seems to struggle. I’m working on some things I think are neat lately (coming soon! I’m planning on putting more effort here than I ever have before)  and I want the website to stay responsive if I ever get slashdotted or something. I ultimately wanted to stay with wordpress as the cms but was willing to try others. I looked at/considered EC2, Media Temple, and Blogger. In the end, I think WordPress.com is the best fit. It has a low price tag ($30/yr for no ads, $30/yr for custom css, and $15/yr so I can use my domain). Besides scalability, I just feel like if I tried I could hack site5 and that scares me. I did find a wordpress bug one time, but when I was looking for it I was pretty impressed with the general code quality.

My big reservation with wordpress.com was that I couldn’t upload arbitrary files to share, but with things like skydrive (which I use), dropbox, google drive, and Amazon’s services it make sense to separate that piece and link to that content. I spent a lot of time this weekend working to get the new setup (my lovely wife also helped with the CSS), and I think it’s generally looking pretty good :)